India's Naila Fort Undergoes a Total Transformation

Rajasthan is India's most northwestern state, a harsh but beautiful landscape of rugged desert, mountain passes, jewel-like lakes and fairy-tale forts and palaces. But until the latter years of the twentieth century it was ruled by a confederation of warrior clans (Rajasthan means "land of princes"), and it still retains its aura of remoteness and feudal romance—which makes it a perfect retreat for one of India's corporate rajas, the hotel magnate P. R. S. Oberoi.

"I wanted a place in Rajasthan," he says, "a haveli—a mansion—or a fort, and I searched for the right one for two winters." Educated in India, Switzerland and Britain, "Biki" Oberoi is a dynamic businessman with a highly evolved sense of the contemporary traveler's zeitgeist. On his watch the Oberoi Group has developed a number of "heritage hotels," such as the luxurious Rajvilas, outside Jaipur, and the new Amarvilas in Agra (see Architectural Digest, August 1998 and July 2001, respectively). But even he had difficulty locating the property he was looking for. Then a friend told him of a deserted one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old fortress not far from Jaipur; it was in a considerable state of disrepair, the friend said, but it might be available—would Oberoi like to see it?

Naila Fort was built as a garrison to defend the village of Naila and the land in the valley beyond, and its nearly impregnable position on a rocky crag in the Aravalli mountains almost defeated its prospective purchaser at the outset. The road to the fort had been washed out in a heavy rainstorm a year before, Oberoi recalls. "We had to climb to the fort on foot, over a landslide, until we reached the top." His efforts were rewarded: The buildings, though tumbledown and stripped of their doors and windows by scavengers, were structurally sound, and the view was magnificent. He decided then and there to buy it. His friend was less impressed: "He told me, You must be mad,' " Oberoi says with a laugh. The road's impassable—how will you get any building materials up there?' Yet when no truck could navigate the road's steep serpentine turns, Oberoi was unfazed: He had the construction materials and appliances dropped off at the foot of the mountain and taken up by tractor.

The road wasn't the only challenge he faced. The fort had historically relied on rainwater cisterns for its water supply, and a well could not be dug through the mountain bedrock. Oberoi had to negotiate the purchase of a farm in the valley below—a process that took two years and considerable haggling—and dig an artesian well there from which water would be pumped up to the fort. There were govern-mental hurdles as well: After its purchase, Naila was declared a heritage site by the state government of Rajasthan, which meant that, apart from the restoration itself, no architectural changes could be made to the buildings. And once the restoration was completed, the fort had to be open to visitors on a limited basis.

Not that these restrictions bothered Oberoi in the slightest: "I didn't want to alter anything architecturally," he says. "I bought it because it looked interesting. What I'd do with it, we'd see later." To plot the reconstruction of the fort and turn it into a twenty-first-century residence, he looked to Prabhat Patki, the Bombay-based architect whose culturally sensitive designs make Rajvilas and Amarvilas so distinctive. The restoration was carried out by an in-house team of craftsmen under Oberoi's meticulous direction.

Their first task was to repair and rebuild the crenellated walls and squat turrets, which are made from the same lime-plastered sandstone used in other fortified buildings in the area, notably the palace-fort at Amber and the City Palace in Jaipur. Interior finishing followed—including stone carving, fresco and the application of a wall glaze made from white lime, ground marble and eggshells called aarish, which is distinctive to Rajasthan. "The older it gets, the better it gets," Oberoi explains. "After a couple of years you have to use a hammer to break it." Such authenticity is evident everywhere at Naila, from the formal dining room's mirror-mosaic ceiling, reminiscent of Amber's Sheesh Mahal, or Hall of Mirrors, to the floral-motif pietra dura of the floors.

Today the fort evokes an enchanted castle, surrounded by replanted woodland in which, Oberoi reports, a leopard was recently seen. At the top of the hill is a ceremonial gateway, the Suraj Poul, with its massive brass-studded antique door, where visitors are welcomed with garlands of red roses, the traditional greeting and an array of fierce-looking seventeenth- and eighteenth-century swords and shields that hang above an antique Gujarati chest. Beyond the Suraj Poul is an expansive forecourt, lushly planted with roses, palms and fruit trees. In Naila's fortress days this would have been a kind of barracks area, but now it serves to separate the main entrance from the residential quarters, housed in a turreted rectangle around four interior courtyards.

The residence is entered through another gateway, the Ganesh Poul (elephant-headed Ganesh is the Hindu god of prosperity), where twin elephants patinated in gold leaf guard the brass doors. The rooms there exhibit a clear sense of place: Oberoi is an inveterate collector. The former fortress is the perfect showcase for his antique weaponry, as it is for the old Indian furniture for which he and interior designer Sunita Kohli haunted the antiques dealers in Ramgarh, a town in the nearby province of Shekhawati: a Raj-era wicker-seated planter's chair, armoires and chests, as well as a brightly painted table for the formal dining room.

But Naila is anything but a rigid period reconstruction. The Indian pieces are part of an eclectic mix of European and other Asian furnishings and artifacts: a nineteenth-century Egyptian folding chair in teak inlaid with mother-of-pearl for the private drawing room, eighteenth-century travel prints of India by English lithographers Thomas and William Daniell, Venetian-influenced mirrors and chandeliers from Calcutta and deep upholstered sofas. And of course it boasts the de rigueur twenty-first-century amenities: a blue-tiled swimming pool and the latest communications equipment.

The whole residence, in fact, radiates comfort as well as luxury—not for nothing is Oberoi a hotelier par excellence—and visitors could be pardoned for wishing to extend their stays indefinitely. Which might not sit well with its proud but extremely private owner: Asked what he most loves about his mountaintop domain, he unhesitatingly replies, "Its solitude."

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